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FAILURE FOR GIANT OIL TRAIN SCHEME IN VANCOUVER (WASHINGTON)

Today, Governor Inslee delivered the coup de grâce to the proposed Vancouver Energy oil terminal. Planned for a site within blast radius of downtown Vancouver, Washington, the facility would have been North America’s biggest oil train depot, drawing at least 5 dangerous oil trains each day across the interior Northwest to the banks of the Columbia River.

For everyone who cares about clean water, public safety, and climate change, this was a profoundly welcome decision. And it also stands as a testament to the efforts all the individuals and organizations who fought the project: the Stand Up To Oil campaign, Northwest tribes, thousands upon thousands of community members, and—to toot our own horn just a bit—those of us here at Sightline.

The rail terminal at Vancouver was the last remaining undecided project of at least a dozen well-developed schemes planned for Northwest ports and refineries, including at Clatskanie, Longview, Grays Harbor, Tacoma, Anacortes, and Whatcom County. In combination, these projects might have shipped as much as one million barrels of crude oil in up to 100 trains per week—a staggering volume of dirty fuel.

Yet one after another, they stumbled and fell in the face of coordinated and intractable opposition in the Northwest—the movement we’ve taken to calling the Thin Green Line. Sightline is proud to have contributed to the fight and we are proud of our partners: these successes would not have been possible without a huge array of people and organizations.

With the demise of oil-by-rail at Vancouver, the Thin Green Line will focus on the few remaining fossil fuel proposals still remaining: especially the biggest-in-the-world methanol refinery at Kalama, Washington, as well as LNG facilities planned for Coos Bay, Oregon, and Tacoma, Washington.